


Forget About the Leaves in the Eaves

by MonsterTesk



Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, M/M, partial plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-16
Updated: 2016-04-16
Packaged: 2018-06-02 15:50:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6572272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MonsterTesk/pseuds/MonsterTesk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As well as the eyes and anything else between us.</p><p>A reunion and departure precisely not quite in that order.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forget About the Leaves in the Eaves

**Author's Note:**

> This is an excerpt from a story I'll never write. Mostly, it can stand alone. To avoid confusion, this would have been a preternatural AU with weird magic and shit like the kindly ones. 
> 
> Everything in italics is from before Raylan left.

Sometimes it’s the wind, calling through the eaves, hissing little invitations to him in the night when he’s tucked in to bed. Other times, it’s little more than a bird that catches his attention, gets him to look a new direction, at a path that wasn’t there before or a dim glow that shouldn’t exist. Most often, it’s not so subtle, not so psychical. Most often, it’s a sensation he can’t explain or describe. It’s as if there’s a magnet inside his bones that gently guides him in the right direction; a compass that has never pointed true north. It’s something he could choose to disregard but never ignore. It was gone for a very long time and Boyd had not liked that at all. He had felt as if his very marrow had gone off without him, moved on, and left him with a hollow skeleton and a void nothing could fill. He had wondered, on his more morbid nights, if this is what giants in tales felt and that was why they sucked the marrow out of the bones of men. He had sympathized with them, understood their hunger, had shared their craving for something to fill them up at their very centers and the desperation in knowing the small meals before them would do little to help tide over the pain of it. 

And now here it was some twenty years later back in his bones. Boyd would frown if the relief of it weren’t so great. He had known this was coming, had known since he caught site of a hat perched atop a familiar head even if he hadn’t understood _why_ he’d known in the instant Raylan walked into that church. Some things weren’t meant for Boyd to understand. 

 

So now, he walks through trees and brush, over hills and through hollers as if distance were merely a momentary inconvenience, as if he could walk ten thousand leagues and feel none of it at the end. Trees parted before him like guests at a gathering and closed rank behind him to talk amongst themselves, whisper gossip about his passing. 

The moon is bright and the woods are dark and Boyd Crowder acknowledges little of the former and none of the latter. 

It’s been hours or minutes since he stepped off his porch, feet unshod, and pajamas hung low but this matters not. There. Just ahead, _just_ beyond a patch of brush is where he is meant to go. He laughs, feet meeting only clear even dirt and nothing else as he hurries along. It’s back. It’s finally, _finally,_ back. 

The brush clears out of his way. 

Boyd stops, laugh caught in his throat. No— he may say this out loud— this isn’t right. It’s not supposed to be you. 

The figure turns, frown tight on its face. 

“Who else? Who else?” It asks. 

Boyd shakes his head, stepping back, hand coming up to cover his mouth. 

“Not him. Please, please. Not him.” 

It laughs, shaking its head. 

“I could be no one else.” 

Boyd trembles before it, denial settling like the film of fat at the top of a stew over his bones. 

“Take another form. Just not that one.” 

Hands go to hips, a wry smile stretches thin, familiar lips. 

 

_“Oooh, fuck,” a voice quivers out under Boyd, hands digging into his shoulders._

_“You like that, son?”_

_Wide eyes meet his and Boyd smirks, self-satisfied._

_“I see surprise on your face. Were you expecting me not to make it good for you?”_

_He thrusts, slow, long, purposefully._

_There’s a hiss and the arch of a back, nails dragging welts down his back._

_“_ Boyd,” _he pants._

 

_“_ Boyd,” it calls softly, teasingly. 

“No. Anyone else. I won’t. Not him. Not him.” 

It stretches arms wide, fingers spanning out like the spokes of a bike wheel. 

“But this is what I look like,” it says with a laugh. 

Boyd shakes his head, refuses to allow this betrayal. Not from it. He’d expect this from anyone but it; it has never betrayed him, lied to him. It has always favored Boyd. 

“No. It’s _not_.”

“It is.” 

Boyd takes another step back, foot landing on a twig as it frowns again. The pain is sharp and sudden. 

“That’s not—”

 

_“—What I meant, Boyd, and you know it. Stop twisting my words around,” Raylan hisses, mouth tight and curled unhappily._

_Boyd balls his hands into fists, suddenly desiring to punch something— anything._

_“Then how else am I to take it, huh?”_

_Raylan huffs, throws his hands into the air, and begins to pace from wall to wall in the tiny cabin._

_“I can’t stay here. You know that.”_

_Boyd crosses his arms, leans back on his hip._

_“I know you won’t try.”_

_Raylan stills, hands balling into fists._

_“I won’t end up another shit-kicking hillbilly crime lord’s thug.”_

_“Then don’t—“_

 

“Look like him. Please,” Boyd tries to plead, folds his hands together in supplication over his chest. 

It crosses its arms, body seeming to grow longer and thinner, stretching as if it were a rubber photograph. 

“I will do no such thing. This is what I look like.” 

Boyd stumbles over a rock as he retreats from the form before him. He can’t take this. Can’t handle it looking like—

 

“ _Raylan,” Boyd pants, body moving slow, fingers curled into the bare mattress below him, mouth pressed to a hot ear. “Do you know how good you feel? Do you?”_

_“Shut up, Boyd,” Raylan snaps, spreading his legs farther, offering more of himself._

_“So good, boy. And the way you look?” Boyd hums, presses the tip of his tongue to the curve of the ear in front of him. “Finger licking good. Mmmhmm.”_

_Raylan laughs, shivers, smacks Boyd’s shoulder._

_“I’m not a goddamn piece of meat!”_

_Boyd grins, rakes his eyes down the body below him, to the leaking erection pressed wet and desperate against Raylan’s stomach and back up to the sweat gathering on Raylan’s forehead. Raylan flushes._

_“No,” he murmurs, pressing in again. “You’re—“_

 

“Not him.” Boyd sits down heavy on the ground, ignoring the rocks under his ass. 

“I am him,” it says, pauses. “For the moment.”

Boyd digs nails into the earth, feels the hollows of the mines below him briefly. 

“Then let the moment pass. Become someone else.”

It sighs like a parent attempting to explain something large and complex to a child. 

“I cannot.” 

“Can’t or won’t?” Boyd snaps.

 

“ _Both,” Raylan snaps back, shoulders tense and square._

_Boyd’s sag in defeat. He breathes in deep._

_“Baby—”_

_Raylan shakes his head, mind settled on the matter. Boyd can feel him closing off, building walls._

_The distance is short between them but Boyd feels as if it is leagues. He walks the distance anyway, lays a hand on his shoulder, slides it down into the curve of his lower back, and kisses the nape of Raylan’s neck._

_Raylan turns his head away._

_“I thought you’d understand,” Raylan whispers, grief and something else in his voice._

 

“I can’t and, more importantly, don’t want to. I thought you would welcome me this way,” it says, voice full of sorrow. 

Boyd shakes his head, covers his face with both of his hands. 

“It hurts,” he whines. 

It shushes him, smoothing its hands down his back. 

“I did not think it would. For that, I am sorry.” 

Boyd shakes his head, a silent and emphatic, “No,” as it wraps him up in its arms, pulls him in against its chest gently, and kisses his forehead. 

“Truth be told, I thought you knew—”

 

_“This day would come. I told you I wasn’t staying. I told you.”_

_Boyd turns his head away, watches the moss growing on the cabin sill change colors in the evening light._

_“Boyd.”_

_A hand touches his cheek, turns his head._

_Lips against his._

_Boyd can’t help but respond, desire more, as long arms wrap around him, envelope him in their sharp embrace. He turns it into more, uses tongue and teeth and lips and fingers until the chest against his is heaving, until his back is pressed against the edge of the sill._

_“You’re fighting dirty,” Raylan whispers against his lips._

_Boyd smiles, resists the urge to bite until there’s blood._

_“Course I am.”_

_Raylan smiles sad, soft._

_Boyd reaches down and grabs a part of him that is neither sad nor soft._

_“How about you put this to use?”_

_Raylan’s eyes widen, hips push gently against his hand._

_“You sure?”_

_Boyd nods, yanking the button of Raylan’s jeans open. He wants it— needs it; to feel Raylan fill him up, churn his insides up physically the way he is mentally._

_“We’ve never—“_

 

_“_ Lie to you, my Boyd. Never.” 

Boyd laughs, bitter and sharp. 

It frowns down at him, tightening its arms around him, but does not reprimand him. 

“You still don’t believe me, do you?”

Boyd shakes his head. He can’t. It’s incomprehensible. He refuses. 

It sighs, looks a hundred yards beyond Boyd. 

“Perhaps I should not have come back. Perhaps… I thought more of you than you were capable of.” 

It stands, leaving Boyd on the hard, cold ground. It turns. 

“I’m disappointed, my Boyd.”

It walks away into the curve of shadows the woods and the moon make together. 

Boyd reaches out, suddenly desperate, scared that it will take with it what it has only recently given back to him. 

“No, don’t—“

 

_“Stop. Fuck.”_

_Raylan laughs, pushes harder into Boyd, fingers digging into Boyd’s thighs._

_The window sill is hard and rough under him but so is what Raylan is doing to him so Boyd can accept it; feels it fits the theme. Raylan thrusts, jagged, sharp, and sudden._

_Boyd stiffens, mouth open, eyes wide._

_Raylan grins. Does it again._

_Boyd’s head cracks against the dirty glass behind him. He hears the glass crack in return._

_Raylan won’t stop laughing even as he presses his mouth to Boyd’s neck, his chest._

_“Keep a fucking rhythm, you asshole,” Boyd grits out between clenched teeth, thighs screaming at the exertion of keeping them up and around Raylan’s thin frame._

_“No.” The word slips out of Raylan’s smiling mouth and he does it again. Shallow and sharp and sudden and there’s no way for Boyd to get used to it, to expect it, because Raylan keeps switching up, changing angle and timing, and depth as if he were pulling random numbers to decide what to do to him._

_Boyd whines, head sliding and bumping against the glass. It creaks plaintively behind him but he doesn’t care for its warning, is too preoccupied with how Raylan is taking him apart with a cavalier lack of care to bother._

_Raylan jabs inside of him, jack-rabbit quick and shallow, vibrating the whole of Boyd’s existence. He clutches at Raylan’s hair, tugs on it, pulling in an attempt to get that mouth on his._

_It doesn’t work. Raylan latches his mouth onto Boyd’s chest just to the side of his heart and sucks instead, slowing down, going deeper. He keeps this slow drag up; filling Boyd with exquisite care then pulling out as if he means to drag the rest of Boyd’s insides out with him._

_Boyd capitulates, curling down and around him, legs hiking up Raylan’s sides, mouth grazing his hair in between his fists as he’s rocked slowly like a boat lost in a gentle ocean._

_He shakes._

_He can’t help it._

_He moans._

_He can’t help it._

_Raylan sinks his teeth slowly. indelibly, into the skin he’s sucked into his mouth._

_Boyd can’t get in a breath, a thought, a whimper, anything at all but Raylan._

_Fast as lightning, as the water in the river, Raylan rears back, scraping his teeth across skin when he does, and slams into Boyd. Hard. Hard enough that Boyd’s head flies back again, hits the window. It breaks, shatters._

_And he does with it. Screaming._

**Author's Note:**

> Mostly, I'm writing this because the scene wouldn't get out of my head. I know it's shit and probably doesn't make sense out of the context of the world I built in my head around it but, you know. Sometimes you just can't get yourself to say, "Not today, Satan," and you write weird abstracted shit.


End file.
